Surely problems arise when the mechanism becomes the sole reason for
the interest!  In the area of player pianos, the mechanical musical
devices were not made originally for users to focus on their mechanisms
-- they were quite definitely for musical purposes.

Maybe it was different for things such as musical boxes, at least some
of which were made as conversation pieces where the mechanisms would be
observed and enthused over, but let's not get diverted by these.

I was struck by the recent posting bemoaning the way that folks got
YouTube contributions wrong by playing the instruments with their cases
on, which is truly absurd!  Playing instruments as they were meant to
be played is exactly what should be done when showing them off to others.

Clearly, many of us love messing around with mechanisms, but those who
focus on mechanical musical devices surely have an underlying interest
in the music, or else why not choose some other form of machine?  Those
with so little interest in these machines that they watch rather than
listen to them are hardly going to get the musical best from their
instruments, and it's hardly a direction that we want the hobby to go.

We were told yesterday that folks kept playing a player piano while
the normal keyboard instruments sat idle, as if this proves that people
like mechanical music.  Hardly!  It's the music that keeps them playing,
not the mechanism.  If you took the hammers off so that it made no
sound, I suspect that attention would last a few seconds and no more.
The mechanism is doing its job of providing access to music that
non-keyboard-players otherwise cannot make.  That's what the instrument
was meant to do, and it does it well.

What comes over to me from YouTube entries is how poorly many of the
instruments work, or how poorly they are operated.  Clearly, there's
little expectation from their owners of achieving anything better than
dull and genuinely mechanical performances, which is a real pity.

The hobby does a very poor job indeed of letting folks know just how
good many of these instruments are when they work properly.  Their
makers never thought of them as mere machines: they were to be listened
to and provide musical entertainment.

Julian Dyer